Social Mediocrity

In my July 11 post on the Accessiversity Facebook page, I felt it necessary to explain to my ever-expanding social media audience why it had taken me so long to finally join Facebook. For those of you who may have missed it, here is what I wrote:

“Hello to my ever-expanding Facebook community…

I have spent the good part of the last three days reconnecting with acquaintances from my past, many of whom are people I knew back in high school that I haven’t seen in nearly 30 years.

My absence from Facebook all of these years has been intentional, because I was worried that reconnecting with all of you and having to update you on what I was going through would just serve as an ongoing source of pain and frustration and shame, and right or wrong, I felt it was just easier to leave some things in the past.

It is only now, after all of these years, that I finally feel comfortable enough to talk about what happened to me following high school.

For those of you who don’t know, I suffered late onset blindness in my early twenties as a result of an auto-immune disorder that attacked the retinas in my eyes. The recurrent vasculitis, retinal detachments, and countless procedures and surgeries left me with a prosthetic left eye, and 8/200 vision in the lower periphery of my right eye which resulted in me becoming statutorily blind.

Now, before any of you start feeling sorry for me, let me stop you to say that I’m fine. Despite this crappy hand that I was dealt, I came to grips with everything and tried to move on the best I could. Besides the whole not being able to see thing, I assure you that I am the same Chris Knapp that you all knew back in high school. I won’t go into it here, but if you haven’t already done so, I would encourage you to read my introductory blog post from October 15 to learn more about the circumstances surrounding my disability and why I decided to launch Accessiversity and start my “Tales of the Reluctant Blind” blog.

I never planned on becoming disabled – let alone becoming an advocate for the disability community – but somehow life chose me. Now, as an accessibility consultant, and through my Accessiversity Facebook page and “Tales of the Reluctant Blind” blog I realize that I have a platform for helping advance the important conversation about different accessibility and disability-related topics. So, that is exactly what I am going to do.

And you all can help me too, by subscribing to our monthly Knapp Strategic newsletter, continuing to read my “Tales of the Reluctant Blind” blog and liking/sharing the posts on our  Accessiversity Facebook page.

It’s not your typical, boring old blog, and I promise you that there is a little bit of something for everyone.

Please check it out when you get a chance, and thank you in advance for your continued support!”

More To The Story

While everything I said above is accurate – that I was worried about the psychological toll that having to continually revisit my past traumas would have on my fragile psyche – in full disclosure, that is not the only reason I had resisted getting onto Facebook.

As it turns out, the other reason is much more pragmatic. Simply put, for individuals with disabilities like myself, managing social media while relying on assistive technology is a giant pain in the ass. I know it’s a lame excuse, but I just didn’t want the additional stress or headache of having to learn, and eventually master, these other technologies on top of everything else I was juggling.

I understand and can appreciate the allure of social media. I can accept that it is a powerful tool for helping connect us to one another. As a business owner, I can buy into the necessary and utilitarian function of social media, how it’s an important tool for promoting your business and services and reaching and engaging with a  broader audience.

All of these things are true, but for me, it doesn’t make adjusting to the social media learning curve any easier. Yes, I’m now on social media, but getting there has been a struggle.

So, just for some additional context:

Before I could even get started, there were several people working in the background that helped me to get set up. My friend Andrea Kerbuski, who designed my Knapp Strategic website and who’s company, AK Stories, is responsible for a bunch of the awesome photos on my site, helped me to create the Accessiversity Facebook page. Sydney Naseef helped with the design and form of my monthly Knapp Strategic newsletter, as well as assisting me with publishing content on the blog, posting on Facebook and LinkedIn and helping manage my overall social media campaign. I also relied on my wife Teresa, who was always willing to point out how little I actually knew about the inner-workings of Facebook, in that kind of brutally honest way that only a wife and husband can communicate.

While I have started to dabble with other social media, including becoming active again on LinkedIn, for this blog I am going to primarily focus on my experiences with Facebook.

In terms of how I am going onto Facebook, I am almost always using my iPhone, which again, for those of you who are new to my blog, I use with the “voiceover” accessibility setting turned on. For any of you iPhone users out there who are curious about what it’s like to experience Facebook using only “voiceover” to bump your way around the site, you can go into your settings and turn on “voiceover” to try it for yourself. Alternatively, you can simply tell Siri to “turn on voiceover” and the synthesized speech should start right up. Before you start experimenting with this accessibility feature, you may want to take a moment to familiarize yourself with the various finger swipes and gestures that are enabled when “voiceover” is switched on. Bonus points for any of you who also turn on your screen curtain so you can’t be tempted to look at your screen (just remember, cheaters never win, and winners never cheat!)

As a blind user, one of the hardest parts about getting started on Facebook, or familiarizing yourself with any website for that matter, is not really having any frame of reference to compare it to. The only thing you can do is dive right in, and start navigating through the sea of headings and buttons and links. Of course, because Facebook is full of dynamic content that is constantly being added and updated, making sense of the large volumes of content constantly being directed at you can be challenging. Until you are able to fully experience, mentally map out and compartmentalize all of these complex, interconnected components, the interface can also be confusing, disorienting and overwhelming.

Obviously, being a social site, Facebook is all about making it easy to connect with people you know. Unfortunately, not being able to see people’s profile pictures makes establishing these connections a little harder for the blind user. I have sent out friend requests to some of my friends with pretty common names. For example, my friends Jeff Smith and Brad Thomas. Since I can’t see their profile picture, I had no idea if I was actually communicating with the right person, or some other random Jeff Smith or Brad Thomas out there. I later figured out how to use the search feature to look at information on the person’s profile, which provided additional, oftentimes helpful clues when conducting my cyber sleuthing.

For me personally, one of the things that I have had to get used to is listening to voiceover announce people’s names. Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful for technology that allows me to even be able to use a site like Facebook. However, even the most advanced synthesized speech still has plenty of room for improvement. There is really no way around it – you end up having to train your ears to listen for any recognizable names when scrolling through lists of suggested friends, which is not only a test of your dexterity and patience, but also your memory, as you have to simultaneously think about everyone you have ever known over your entire life and be able to put two and two together while searching on the fly. This is  especially tricky when it comes to a lot of my female friends out there, since you have to listen for their maiden and married names, and think whether you know anyone by one or both of these names.

I’m a little embarrassed to admit this, but I had been on Facebook for several weeks before I figured out that I needed to download and install Messenger to be able to communicate with my friends. I had seen things pop up about messaging people, and eventually noticed that it appeared that I had messages sitting there in the cue waiting for me, but every time I would click on something, it prompted me to download the Messenger app onto my phone and I wasn’t convinced that this was something I needed or wanted. Eventually I acquiesced and found myself in the Apple app store, and moments later, I was up and running.

Instantly, I was able to message back and forth with my Facebook friends. And just as fast, I had this whole new piece of technology that I would need to learn, monitor and squeeze in with everything else. But you take the good with the bad, right? If I hadn’t downloaded and installed the Messenger app, I might not have seen the message sitting there from my friend Dave Crater, and I may have never connected with him the other week and had this opportunity to talk for the first time since we had graduated from high school. If I hadn’t downloaded the Messenger app I may not ever have played around with its built-in search feature, and may have never used it to search for other friends who I had lost touch with over the years. This might sound trivial to most of you, but to me this was a monumental breakthrough, this moment of clarity and excitement when I realized that even someone like me, a more socially mediocre late-adopter than social media guru, could still use these tools to get reconnected with an increasingly interconnected world.

So as to not be all doom and gloom about the parts of Facebook that don’t work well for someone with a visual impairment, I did want to share a couple of things about the site that I have found to be super cool.

When scrolling through the posts on different people’s stories, “voiceover” will try to describe any embedded images. It doesn’t always work, but it works more times than it doesn’t. For example, “voiceover” describes the below image from the July 6 post on the Accessiversity FB page as: “Image may contain, one or more people, house, tree, sky and outdoor, text that says Hamilton,” (See image below).

Hamilton photo referenced in the first voiceover example.

Sometimes it can even correctly identify the people who are in the photo, such as in the below example of a picture from my friend Sydney Naseef’s page: “Image may contain, three people, including Sydney Naseef, people sitting, shoes and outdoor,” (See photo below).

Photo of Sydney Naseef and her parents referenced in the second voiceover example.

Unfortunately, I have found that “voiceover” has a hard time distinguishing between a collage of photos, and wants to describe the group of photos as one big image. I first figured this out when messaging back and forth with my friend Amy Doll Robinson about some photos that she had recently posted to her page. I had asked her whether a particular picture we were referring to was the one with a big group of people since “voiceover” had said, “image may contain, eight people including Amy Doll Robinson, beach, sky, sunglasses, ocean, outdoor, nature, and water,” when in fact, it was a series of pictures of her and Tony with another couple, who obviously got double-counted.

A lot of times “voiceover” will even announce embedded text in the image, including when people post their favorite memes, which I have to say isn’t necessarily a good thing, in this day and age of so much divisive and incendiary social and political commentary.

When it comes to social media, I know that I am at the beginning of my journey, and undoubtedly, I still have much more to learn. But for the first time in forever, I am excited about what the next chapter has in store for me, and I’m eager to discover, experiment and even fail, and be able to report back about all of these experiences – the good and the bad.

In the interim, please try to cut me some slack. If I somehow miss your message, I share the wrong link with you, or you’re the wrong Jeff Smith or Brad Thomas that receives one of my inadvertent friend requests, know that it probably has less to do with lack of oversight on my part, and is more likely a function of my actual lack of sight. I promise that if you all keep reading,  liking and sharing my posts, I will keep trying to get better at all of this social media stuff, even if my slow indoctrination into your extremely visual world, at least for the short-term,  amounts to a giant pain in my considerably blind ass.